The most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project is pivoting the implementation details of our project without having talked to our professor and TA yet. We are deciding to mount the camera on the ceiling instead of the person, so that it captures both the user and the target in one frame and provides a better map for us to work from. We believe this is more feasible compared to our original idea of mounting the camera on the person. We will talk to both our professor and TA on Monday for their inputs on whether this seems like a feasible implementation.
Another potential risk is that by moving the camera from the person to the ceiling, we are solely relying on computer vision for navigation. Previously, when the camera was mounted on the person, we needed accelerometers and potentiometers to track the displacement of the person as they walked around the room. Now, since both objects are in the camera’s vision, we would need to find a library that can map the environment of the room in 2D space. From that output, we need to make sure that we can run path planning on it and send haptic navigational directions to the user wearing the belt. Since none of us have worked with computer vision extensively, this could become a risk later on in the project. We are managing these risks by considering alternatives if the camera does not work out, for example using LIDAR instead. Since LIDAR sends out a point cloud, the warping effect from a camera may not be as big of a problem.